Annemarie Bridy is a Professor of Law at the University of Idaho College of Law, where she teaches intellectual property and technology law. Her research focuses on the impact of disruptive technologies on legal frameworks for the protection of intellectual property and the enforcement of intellectual property rights. An active scholar, Professor Bridy has published numerous law review articles and book chapters, many of them on the evolving role of online intermediaries in digital anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting operations. She has been interviewed on Internet law topics for national media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, and NPR’s Marketplace Tech Report. In 2014, she testified in the U.S. House of Representatives on the safe harbor provisions in Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In addition to her faculty appointment at Idaho, she has held visiting appointments at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). She is a contributor to CITP’s Freedom to Tinker blog.

Before entering academia, Professor Bridy was a litigation associate at Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads in Philadelphia. She clerked for the Honorable William H. Yohn, Jr. of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Honorable Dolores K. Sloviter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Professor Bridy is a graduate of Boston University (B.A., summa cum laude), the University of California, Irvine (M.A., Ph.D.), and the Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law (J.D., magna cum laude). At U.C. Irvine, she was a Humanities Predoctoral Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellow in the Humanities.

The US Supreme Court issued opinions in two important First Amendment cases this week, one of which obviously had to do with intellectual property law (Matal v. Tam) and one of which didn’t (Packingham v. North Carolina). There is, however, an implicit IP angle in Packingham that’s worth exploring, and it relates to online copyright enforcement.

The Pirate Bay (TPB), that perennial nemesis of copyright holders, is on the ropes again following the CJEU's decision this week in BREIN v. Ziggo. BREIN, the Dutch entertainment industry trade group, sued two ISPs—Ziggo and XS4ALL—seeking a court order to compel them to block the domain names and IP addresses of the legendary torrent sharing site. The Supreme Court of the Netherlands referred two questions to the CJEU: (1) whether TPB’s operation of a searchable index of torrent files violates copyright holders’ right of communication to the public under Article 3(1) of the EU InfoSoc Directive; and (2), in the event that it does, whether the requested injunctions are appropriate against intermediaries under Article 8(3) of the InfoSoc Directive and Article 11 of the IPR Enforcement Directive. This post will focus on the first question, concerning TPB’s liability for unauthorized “communication to the public.”

“Loaded” Kodi set-top boxes are back in the copyright news again this week. (If you’re wondering what Kodi boxes are, and what they have to do with copyrights, here’s a backgrounder.) The CJEU has decided BREIN v. Wullems, a case involving the rights of communication to the public and reproduction.

This is the last of three posts on the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Mavrix v. LiveJournal. The first post considered the court’s conclusion that LiveJournal’s moderation and curation of user-submitted posts created a triable issue of fact on the question of the site’s eligibility for the section 512(c) safe harbor for sites that store material “at the direction” of users. The second post examined the court’s analysis of LiveJournal’s potential knowledge of the alleged infringements in light of the fact that Mavrix didn’t send takedown notices for them. This final entry takes a look at what I identified in the first post as issue (4): whether LiveJournal had the right and ability to control the infringements, as evidenced by the required “something more” than the right to remove or block access to user-submitted infringing material.

This is the second of three posts on the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Mavrix v. LiveJournal. The first post considered (and found fault with) the court’s conclusion that LiveJournal’s moderation and curation of user-submitted posts created a triable issue of fact on the question of the site’s eligibility for the section 512(c) safe harbor for sites that store material “at the direction” of users. This post will consider the court’s analysis of issue (3) of the six issues I called out in the first post: whether, in the absence of takedown notices, LiveJournal had actual or red flag knowledge that the watermarked Mavrix photos were infringing.

These comments were prepared and submitted in response to the U.S. Copyright Office's November 8, 2016 Notice of Inquiry requesting additional public comment on the impact and effectiveness of the DMCA safe harbor provisions in Section 512 of Title 17

These comments were prepared and submitted in response to the U.S. Copyright Office's December 31, 2015 Notice and Request for Public Comment on the impact and effectiveness of the DMCA safe harbor provisions in Section 512 of Title 17.

"Registrars need to be established companies that can demonstrate technical capability and financial stability. If they want to offer recognized domains extensions, they have to work with companies like Verisign, which controls the coveted .com TLD. Establishing a registry for a new TLD, meanwhile, is pretty much a non-starter right now: the last application period was in 2012, when applicants paid $185,000 just to be evaluated. The next application period is tentatively slated for 2020.

"As it stands, AIs in the US cannot be awarded copyright for something they have created. The current policy of the US Copyright Office is to reject claims made for works not authored by humans, but the policy is poorly codified. According to Annemarie Bridy, a professor of law at the University of Idaho and an affiliate scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, there’s no actual requirement for human authorship in the US Copyright Act. Nevertheless, the “courts have always assumed that authorship is a human phenomenon,” she says."

"The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is on an “ambivalent drift” into online content regulation through its contractual facilitation of a “trusted notifier” copyright enforcement program between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the registry operators for two new generic top-level domains, University of Idaho College of Law Professor Annemarie Bridy says in a draft article for the Washington & Lee Law Review."

"That trend is likely to continue, said Annemarie Bridy, a University of Idaho law professor and expert in intellectual property and technology law. "Information is very valuable, and as more and more of the value in our economy is attributable to information and intellectual property, you would expect the control of that information to become more and more contested," Bridy said."

"“I do see that there are human dignity issues in traffic in human body parts, and that there are all kinds of reasons why we wouldn’t want that to happen,” says Annemarie Bridy at the University of Idaho in Moscow. “But in a world of limited law enforcement resources, I think I would try to focus mine on crimes that can [cause] harms to living people.”"

Thursday, April 16

""Ideas, before you actually put them to work, are very vulnerable to stealing," said University of California, Hastings law professor Ben Depoorter. "We give protection to someone who can make good on that idea, and put it into a particular application, practice, expression, art form.